7 ms·

Jira doesn't just reflect, it drives convoluted unhelpful bureaucracy. The tool drives the organization to look like the tool wants it to, which is disorganize

Jira doesn't just reflect, it drives convoluted unhelpful bureaucracy. The tool drives the organization to look like the tool wants it to, which is disorganized half broken "organization" with silly overcomplicated rules that give people something to discuss enthusiastically instead of the actual work that needs doing. Jira is organization poison, not just a reflection of what an organization is.

oneplane 4y ago
No, it isn't. We have plenty of setups in multiple organisations where even within the org only the administrative settings of the server are locked down and everyone else is free to do whatever they need. Lots of teams just use it as a kanban board, while others setup a state machine-based funnel to process user/business input into usable tickets. JIRA in its default configuration essentially lets you create anything, anywhere in any state. Anything beyond that is just bad product configuration. Now, there are plenty of products out there that suck no matter how you configure it (looking at you, ServiceNow). Especially the comments about "I would rather use trello" seem extremely uninformed as you pretty much *are* trello when you just stick to one kanban board and one project.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  > JIRA in its default configuration essentially lets you create anything, anywhere in any state. Anything beyond that is just bad product configuration. That's kind of the point, JIRA has been made into monstrosity at many organizations because the "create anything" mindset.
  - oneplane 4y ago
    How does that make it a monstrosity? Unless we're talking about things that are shared across multiple teams, does it really matter how people use it? Nobody is going to care what someone else does in JIRA when they aren't touching that part anyway. Even with 1000 differently configured projects, your 1 or 2 projects you actually work with and configure are the only ones that matter.
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      Because it attracts somebody 4 layers up to tell somebody 3 layers up to come up with a common Jira platform for everybody and then you don't control how your project is run and then Jira becomes the enemy, a faceless micromanager driving your work life that has strong opinions on how you do everything, a dozen steps that need to be done "right" or you get your half a dozen managers asking if you read the memo about TPS reports, er, Jira tickets.
      - oneplane 4y ago
        So that is not a JIRA problem since you can do a > it attracts somebody 4 layers up to tell somebody 3 layers up to come up with a common with pretty much everything, including a spreadsheet or a plain text file. Conflating bad business practises with tool configuration or products in general doesn't help anyone. If a business is very stiff and scared of its employees, they will try out all sorts of useless control methods hoping it will somehow make some metric 'better'. You can do that with Trello too. Doesn't make Trello a bad product, and it doesn't make JIRA a bad product. At the same time, pretending a larger organisation with many teams can function without any form of state tracking is a nice dream but not a reality either, so it's not like you can do without anything at all. But like reposted a bunch of times, how you do it and who is responsible for it is pretty important.
        colechristensen 4y ago
        The point is that there are tools that enable and encourage bad behavior. The kinds of organizational toxicity simply aren’t possible with some tools, sure an ambitious executive could try but the attempt would fail very quickly. Such attempts to do the broken overburdened nonsense that frequently comes with Jira don’t fail, they are enabled and encouraged. What is technically possible and what is likely are two very distant things.
        msla 4y ago
        "The tool can't do it" is an excuse. Excuses aren't tolerated. Now, make it happen. Tools can't prevent bad management because bad managers don't care about tools. They care about getting what they want, and if the tool doesn't enable it, that's their underlings' problem, not theirs. Jira doesn't stand in their way because nothing stands in their way.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  And how long is this going to last before someone further up decides that Jira needs to be unified for reporting purposes? Eventually somebody with the organization obsession is going to get hired and put somewhere important and their goal is going to be making something complicated and unified and dissent will be "discouraged".
  - femiagbabiaka 4y ago
    “Data needs to be unified for my executive use case” sounds like an org problem not a JIRA one. I’ve encountered it at companies that didn’t use JIRA at all
  - oneplane 4y ago
    Depends on where you work I guess. In reality, reporting really has nothing to do with SWE state tracking. You can also just write a report in a letter and mail it to the board. It's not like they are going to log in to JIRA or even have an account or SSO-allowed credentials since they don't need to be there. On the other hand, like almost copy-pasted here, if a top-down 'unification make it worse for everyone' effort is started, no vendor or tool is going to stop that and your work will get worse.
    - sherifmansour 4y ago
      Spot on. One of the reasons we created Atlas (new product) was precisely this: help stakeholders and dependent teams focus on common language between teams over this misconception that task-level reporting is how they help understand the true state of work. Disclaimer: I work for Atlassian on Atlas, and I didn’t think I could ever get so passionate about soling this problem.
  - geraldwhen 4y ago
    This happened to me!
- asfhagsdf 4y ago
  It amazes me how much hate Jira gets compared to ServiceNow. My last two roles have been heavy on the ServiceNow, and I'd take a fresh breath of Jira any time. My guess is it's because Jira actively targets SMB, while ServiceNow is almost strictly enterprise, and folks in enterprise have already resigned to their fate.
  - mathattack 4y ago
    And try to get a straight answer on pricing from the ServiceNow rep…
    - _jal 4y ago
      The answer is "way more than is sensible, even factoring in how absurd pricing on crap like this has gotten." We dropped SN a couple years back over this. They were charging us about 6-7x what we pay for Jira, and we still use the on-site enterprise version of Jira.
      - oneplane 4y ago
        We have a few of those around as well. While they work fine, I don't really get why anyone would want to self-host JIRA or any COTS product like that anymore. Most instances now seem to be just a case of "our hosting company is fully responsible for it and it's pretty cheap and reliable" and until it starts failing or falling behind the cloud offering it'll probably stay like that. Usually, if it isn't better from a staff-perspective or better for the customer, self-hosting or self-building is less likely to be the answer these days.
        shagie 4y ago
        Self hosting is sometimes easier to do than to argue with data governance about putting the information out a system that is offprem. The additional precautions for HIPAA or PII data that may show up in the comments or attachments can problematic. There are far too many users of all stripes that copy and paste data that they have access to without doing a check on it to see if it really does belong there (and if it does belong in the issue, then applying appropriate permissions to the object).
bragr 4y ago
Jira is highly flexible and customizable, almost to a fault. One Jira can look and operate almost totally different to another with enough customization. If Jira feels inflexible and bureaucratic to you, I'd argue that's only a reflection of how your Jira admins operate or the rules they are forced to implement.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  >customizable, almost to a fault Customizable, absolutely to a fault. It is the infinite customizability of a tool targeted towards middle management which is why Jira can go to hell. It is indeed possible to not be in Jira hell, but inflation of complexity is inevitable and almost entirely irreversible. It encourages and accelerates the path towards bureaucratic hell. Any avoidance of this is a temporary aberration.
- Redsquare 4y ago
  Jira admins....says it all
snapetom 4y ago
It seems the pro-Jira comments here are basically, "It's fine if your organization isn't a mess and you don't abuse it." That's the problem with any tool, framework, language, etc where the defenders main argument is, "It's great as long as you don't abuse it." or to put the former bluntly "It's not the tool, it's your organization." Over and over and over again, if an organization is allowed to abuse and misuse something, it eventually will. Good tooling has opinions and will give you guardrails to not hang yourself.
- carlmr 4y ago
  Exactly, it's the same with C++. You can do great stuff with it as long as every single developer on the project is extremely disciplined and knowledgeable about its pitfalls. As organizations and projects grow you or someone else will at some point hire incompetent people that mess up this delicate balance. Better to have guardrails.
LaGrange 4y ago
> Jira doesn't just reflect, it drives convoluted unhelpful bureaucracy. I though so too, but now I no longer believe that's the case. This is because of two reasons: one questions the statement itself - and the other one questions whether the statement correctly identifies the organizational issue. Firstly, almost every tool I ever used for project organization has grown to similar degree of complexity. All _software_ employed was strongly incentivized to implement new mechanisms of automation and regulation - thus right now I would struggle to name a non-defunct and non-single-user tool that doesn't have the issue. And certainly no tool that that I would call "established" - an arbitrary designation, to be sure, but that largely reflects that the complexity almost _defines_ establishment for a project management tool. Secondly, because I think the issue isn't, truly, the _bureaucracy_. Right now I believe it's the _technocracy_. It's the belief that every process has to be codified into software, and enforced in a manner that would make exceptions impossible without a pull request. This leads to - increase in complexity (because corner cases that would be easily solved with a quick email exchange now require weird workarounds - and if they are too common, actual change to the software) - reduction in real organizational flexibility (any special case is now discouraged on a technical level). Worst part is, it's very hard to sell a shift away from this. Technocratic adherence to software-enforced processes became nearly synonymous to "accountability." In itself that's frustrating to me - I believe this serves to paint organizational failures as forces of nature, effectively reducing accountability. But, so far, I have failed to effectively communicate it to most people - with exception of the very few who, themselves, have a considerable interest in social dynamics, one that goes beyond the professional interest expected of a manager. And to those, those are generally truisms - I'm under no impression I'm particularly original here. --- Aaaanyway, I went back to liking Jira - because, under all the cruft, there's still (or at least there still was) the basic bug tracker software that's almost like Bugzilla, but slightly less painful. And I like bug trackers, as long as they're used to track bugs - not manage projects. Projects are managed by people, and these days I believe that the reason all this software, as complex as it is, keeps failing to accurately communicate the project state, is because you would need the software to be a person.
IOT_Apprentice 4y ago
Lighten up Francis. Jira is simply a tool. if you care that much, apply to be on the team at your company that defines the workflow rules and strip away what isn't needed.

oneplane 4y ago

No, it isn't. We have plenty of setups in multiple organisations where even within the org only the administrative settings of the server are locked down and everyone else is free to do whatever they need. Lots of teams just use it as a kanban board, while others setup a state machine-based funnel to process user/business input into usable tickets. JIRA in its default configuration essentially lets you create anything, anywhere in any state. Anything beyond that is just bad product configuration. Now, there are plenty of products out there that suck no matter how you configure it (looking at you, ServiceNow). Especially the comments about "I would rather use trello" seem extremely uninformed as you pretty much *are* trello when you just stick to one kanban board and one project.

Ensorceled 4y ago
> JIRA in its default configuration essentially lets you create anything, anywhere in any state. Anything beyond that is just bad product configuration. That's kind of the point, JIRA has been made into monstrosity at many organizations because the "create anything" mindset.
- oneplane 4y ago
  How does that make it a monstrosity? Unless we're talking about things that are shared across multiple teams, does it really matter how people use it? Nobody is going to care what someone else does in JIRA when they aren't touching that part anyway. Even with 1000 differently configured projects, your 1 or 2 projects you actually work with and configure are the only ones that matter.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Because it attracts somebody 4 layers up to tell somebody 3 layers up to come up with a common Jira platform for everybody and then you don't control how your project is run and then Jira becomes the enemy, a faceless micromanager driving your work life that has strong opinions on how you do everything, a dozen steps that need to be done "right" or you get your half a dozen managers asking if you read the memo about TPS reports, er, Jira tickets.
    - oneplane 4y ago
      So that is not a JIRA problem since you can do a > it attracts somebody 4 layers up to tell somebody 3 layers up to come up with a common with pretty much everything, including a spreadsheet or a plain text file. Conflating bad business practises with tool configuration or products in general doesn't help anyone. If a business is very stiff and scared of its employees, they will try out all sorts of useless control methods hoping it will somehow make some metric 'better'. You can do that with Trello too. Doesn't make Trello a bad product, and it doesn't make JIRA a bad product. At the same time, pretending a larger organisation with many teams can function without any form of state tracking is a nice dream but not a reality either, so it's not like you can do without anything at all. But like reposted a bunch of times, how you do it and who is responsible for it is pretty important.
      - colechristensen 4y ago
        The point is that there are tools that enable and encourage bad behavior. The kinds of organizational toxicity simply aren’t possible with some tools, sure an ambitious executive could try but the attempt would fail very quickly. Such attempts to do the broken overburdened nonsense that frequently comes with Jira don’t fail, they are enabled and encouraged. What is technically possible and what is likely are two very distant things.
        msla 4y ago
        "The tool can't do it" is an excuse. Excuses aren't tolerated. Now, make it happen. Tools can't prevent bad management because bad managers don't care about tools. They care about getting what they want, and if the tool doesn't enable it, that's their underlings' problem, not theirs. Jira doesn't stand in their way because nothing stands in their way.
colechristensen 4y ago
And how long is this going to last before someone further up decides that Jira needs to be unified for reporting purposes? Eventually somebody with the organization obsession is going to get hired and put somewhere important and their goal is going to be making something complicated and unified and dissent will be "discouraged".
- femiagbabiaka 4y ago
  “Data needs to be unified for my executive use case” sounds like an org problem not a JIRA one. I’ve encountered it at companies that didn’t use JIRA at all
- oneplane 4y ago
  Depends on where you work I guess. In reality, reporting really has nothing to do with SWE state tracking. You can also just write a report in a letter and mail it to the board. It's not like they are going to log in to JIRA or even have an account or SSO-allowed credentials since they don't need to be there. On the other hand, like almost copy-pasted here, if a top-down 'unification make it worse for everyone' effort is started, no vendor or tool is going to stop that and your work will get worse.
  - sherifmansour 4y ago
    Spot on. One of the reasons we created Atlas (new product) was precisely this: help stakeholders and dependent teams focus on common language between teams over this misconception that task-level reporting is how they help understand the true state of work. Disclaimer: I work for Atlassian on Atlas, and I didn’t think I could ever get so passionate about soling this problem.
- geraldwhen 4y ago
  This happened to me!
asfhagsdf 4y ago
It amazes me how much hate Jira gets compared to ServiceNow. My last two roles have been heavy on the ServiceNow, and I'd take a fresh breath of Jira any time. My guess is it's because Jira actively targets SMB, while ServiceNow is almost strictly enterprise, and folks in enterprise have already resigned to their fate.
- mathattack 4y ago
  And try to get a straight answer on pricing from the ServiceNow rep…
  - _jal 4y ago
    The answer is "way more than is sensible, even factoring in how absurd pricing on crap like this has gotten." We dropped SN a couple years back over this. They were charging us about 6-7x what we pay for Jira, and we still use the on-site enterprise version of Jira.
    - oneplane 4y ago
      We have a few of those around as well. While they work fine, I don't really get why anyone would want to self-host JIRA or any COTS product like that anymore. Most instances now seem to be just a case of "our hosting company is fully responsible for it and it's pretty cheap and reliable" and until it starts failing or falling behind the cloud offering it'll probably stay like that. Usually, if it isn't better from a staff-perspective or better for the customer, self-hosting or self-building is less likely to be the answer these days.
      - shagie 4y ago
        Self hosting is sometimes easier to do than to argue with data governance about putting the information out a system that is offprem. The additional precautions for HIPAA or PII data that may show up in the comments or attachments can problematic. There are far too many users of all stripes that copy and paste data that they have access to without doing a check on it to see if it really does belong there (and if it does belong in the issue, then applying appropriate permissions to the object).

bragr 4y ago

Jira is highly flexible and customizable, almost to a fault. One Jira can look and operate almost totally different to another with enough customization. If Jira feels inflexible and bureaucratic to you, I'd argue that's only a reflection of how your Jira admins operate or the rules they are forced to implement.

colechristensen 4y ago
>customizable, almost to a fault Customizable, absolutely to a fault. It is the infinite customizability of a tool targeted towards middle management which is why Jira can go to hell. It is indeed possible to not be in Jira hell, but inflation of complexity is inevitable and almost entirely irreversible. It encourages and accelerates the path towards bureaucratic hell. Any avoidance of this is a temporary aberration.
Redsquare 4y ago
Jira admins....says it all

snapetom 4y ago

It seems the pro-Jira comments here are basically, "It's fine if your organization isn't a mess and you don't abuse it." That's the problem with any tool, framework, language, etc where the defenders main argument is, "It's great as long as you don't abuse it." or to put the former bluntly "It's not the tool, it's your organization." Over and over and over again, if an organization is allowed to abuse and misuse something, it eventually will. Good tooling has opinions and will give you guardrails to not hang yourself.

carlmr 4y ago
Exactly, it's the same with C++. You can do great stuff with it as long as every single developer on the project is extremely disciplined and knowledgeable about its pitfalls. As organizations and projects grow you or someone else will at some point hire incompetent people that mess up this delicate balance. Better to have guardrails.

LaGrange 4y ago

> Jira doesn't just reflect, it drives convoluted unhelpful bureaucracy. I though so too, but now I no longer believe that's the case. This is because of two reasons: one questions the statement itself - and the other one questions whether the statement correctly identifies the organizational issue. Firstly, almost every tool I ever used for project organization has grown to similar degree of complexity. All _software_ employed was strongly incentivized to implement new mechanisms of automation and regulation - thus right now I would struggle to name a non-defunct and non-single-user tool that doesn't have the issue. And certainly no tool that that I would call "established" - an arbitrary designation, to be sure, but that largely reflects that the complexity almost _defines_ establishment for a project management tool. Secondly, because I think the issue isn't, truly, the _bureaucracy_. Right now I believe it's the _technocracy_. It's the belief that every process has to be codified into software, and enforced in a manner that would make exceptions impossible without a pull request. This leads to - increase in complexity (because corner cases that would be easily solved with a quick email exchange now require weird workarounds - and if they are too common, actual change to the software) - reduction in real organizational flexibility (any special case is now discouraged on a technical level). Worst part is, it's very hard to sell a shift away from this. Technocratic adherence to software-enforced processes became nearly synonymous to "accountability." In itself that's frustrating to me - I believe this serves to paint organizational failures as forces of nature, effectively reducing accountability. But, so far, I have failed to effectively communicate it to most people - with exception of the very few who, themselves, have a considerable interest in social dynamics, one that goes beyond the professional interest expected of a manager. And to those, those are generally truisms - I'm under no impression I'm particularly original here. --- Aaaanyway, I went back to liking Jira - because, under all the cruft, there's still (or at least there still was) the basic bug tracker software that's almost like Bugzilla, but slightly less painful. And I like bug trackers, as long as they're used to track bugs - not manage projects. Projects are managed by people, and these days I believe that the reason all this software, as complex as it is, keeps failing to accurately communicate the project state, is because you would need the software to be a person.

IOT_Apprentice 4y ago

Lighten up Francis. Jira is simply a tool. if you care that much, apply to be on the team at your company that defines the workflow rules and strip away what isn't needed.